


all i want is enough to believe

by jokeperalta



Category: Bodyguard (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death Fix, F/M, Fix-It, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Introspection, Non Specific Sexual Situations, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Temporary Character Death, please read this fic as it is intended: as a massive middle finger to jed mercurio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-24
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-16 13:59:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16087538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokeperalta/pseuds/jokeperalta
Summary: It doesn’t feel like he has much of a right to buying flowers, or to even being here today. PPOs don’t get invited to the funerals of their Principals for good reasons.Not least that it being her funeral means he failed quite spectacularly as her PPO.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Ignores everything that happens beyond ep4 (I haven't worked myself up to watch ep 5 or 6 yet) and pretty much the whole of The Conspiracy™️ plot because fuck you, Jed.
> 
> I’m taking her out of the goddamn fridge.

_“Why’d your marriage end?”_

_“Christ, woman,” David mutters against the column of her throat. He leans back into the sofa cushions. “..._ Now _?”_

_“Sorry. Buzzkill, I know.”_

_He thinks about how to answer her question carefully. He’s not sure he’s ever explained it out loud before. Nobody usually asked- out of politeness, or the assumption that they already knew, or both._

_“Ignore me,” Julia says when he doesn’t answer. “I was a barrister— never learnt when not to ask a blunt question.”_

_“No, it’s- it’s fine.”_

_He rests his hands on her thighs, bracketed on each side of his._

_“I used to think it was just… the Army, Afghanistan, all of that- that she could never understand what happened, what it was like,” he starts slowly. “But when all the other married guys in your unit come back and still have happy marriages, you have to start looking closer to home._

_“And Vicky, she did... everything,” he continues. “Everything she could think of- put everything on hold for me, to get it back to how it was before I left. But it wasn’t enough, in the end.”_

_“You still love her.”_

_It isn’t a question. Which is a good thing really since he hasn’t got a response for it.  His feelings for his wife is way too fucked a subject to talk about with her. He isn’t that masochistic, present situation excepted._

_He glances at her. “What about you? What happened with you and...-“_

_For the life of him, he can’t remember what the bloke’s name is._

_“Roger and I?” Julia shrugs noncommittally. “Westminster happened.”_

_It’s a true politician’s answer that says everything but tells him nothing. It’s what he should have expected but it still grinds him. How he can tell her something he’s never told anyone else and get almost nothing in return. How their respective places in the chain of command bleeds into whatever this is._

_“And Roger can be a real prick when he wants to be,” she adds._

_“Never would’ve guessed.”_

_She flashes him a brilliant smile, cocking her head. “Do I detect a note of sarcasm in your tone, Sergeant Budd?”_

_“No, ma’am. Never, ma’am.”_

_Julia leans up on her knees, tilts his head back between her hands, so she’s towering over him._

_“I should have you written up for insubordination.”_

_David smirks at her, lips just barely grazing hers. “Aye, maybe you should.”_

 

 

-

 

 

He passes a florists on his way there. He goes in before he can talk himself out of it.

David doesn’t miss the dirty look the florist gives him before she covers it with a forced smile. Probably because it’s less than five minutes before she’s due to shut up shop.

He picks up the first bouquet he sees that seems appropriate and inconspicuous enough, just a few springs of purple hyacinths tied together with green twine.

It doesn’t feel like he has much of a right to buying flowers, or to even being here today. PPOs don’t get invited to the funerals of their Principals for good reasons.

Not least that it being her funeral means he failed quite spectacularly as her PPO.

Good thing he’s already missed it then.

 

 

 

The grave is still open from the ceremony, ended hours before, and his dress shoes slide under the artificial grass mats. There’s a whole succession of Montagues next to and around her in what must be the family plot.

“You shouldn’t be in here, you know.”

It’s rare that anyone gets the jump on him anymore. An older man stands next to him, leaning heavily against his garden brush.

“I know, I just-“ David gestures at the grave, a little helplessly.

“Did you know her?”

David looks down at the temporary cross. _Julia Elizabeth Montague,_ the plaque reads. _Loving daughter, dedicated public servant - a friend to all_.

Somehow he can’t imagine even Julia herself agreeing with the final inscription. The woman had enemies coming out of her ears: her death was testament to that.

“No,” he answers finally. The truth of the statement only hits him when he says it aloud.

He knew fuck all about her, really.

The warden looks him up and down, and he’s sure he’s raising suspicion now if he wasn’t before.

“I’ll be gone in a minute, mate, I just need to... pay my respects.”

“Right you are,” the man says. There must be something about him that convinces the warden he’s not a graveyard stalker, or a protester, or anyone equally unsavoury. “Give me a shout when you’re ready and I’ll unlock the gate for you. You don’t need to scale it again.”

He looks pointedly at the mud scuffs on the shins of David’s trousers with a good natured smile. The unexpected kindness raises a lump in David’s throat. “Thank you.”

And then he’s alone with her. For the first time since that room backstage, since _I want you right beside me._

It might as well have been years ago.

He doesn’t talk to her. Whatever religious faith he’d had died a quick death the first time he saw a human being blown apart by an IED, so he doesn’t imagine she can hear him, or that she’s looking down on him. What they didn’t say to each other -all that mess of feelings and secrets and lies- is his burden to carry now. Too many gravesides have taught him that hard lesson.

He lays the hyacinth beside the cross, almost hidden behind dozens of crisp white roses, and walks away. It’s easier not to look back.

 

 

The journey back from Cheltenham is a long one.

Vicky gives him a solidly concerned look when he turns up at the house, late at night, in his funeral blacks. He imagines she must have seen the funeral on the news - it’s almost all they’ve been covering all day.

“The couch is made up for you,” she tells him.

He’s been ‘sleeping’ there for nearly two weeks now, ever since she found him with a blank bullet in his temple. She doesn’t trust him enough to allow him to spend a night alone, which is probably fair.

He’s grateful she doesn’t bring up the elephant now residing in the room with him.

“Thanks, Vick.”

“G’night.”

He does not sleep. He lies in the dark for hours, with his tremoring hand and memories of dust in his lungs from the blast and her blood everywhere, everywhere. It’s so real that he can almost hear the screams all over again. Can almost see the confusion and concern on her face as he bolted towards her. Eventually he rises, gets dressed and goes for a run. He runs until his leg muscles are screaming, until he can’t hear anything except the pound of his feet on the concrete below him.

 

 

- 

 

 

_“Who did you vote for, David?” Julia asks him. Her voice is weak and breathy, probably because his head is between her legs._

_Enjoyable as it is, David stops what he’s doing. He leans his forehead on her leg, physically unable to stop a long resigned sigh._

_“Oh, god, you’re not one of those anti-disestablishment twats, are you? Please tell me you vote.”_

_“You really wanna ask me about this right now?” David says to her inner thigh, half in a huffed laugh. “Why d’you always do this?”_

_“I can’t help myself-- you’re just so interesting.”_

_He looks up then, sure she’s making fun of him, but finds she’s (mostly) serious. Nobody’s ever described him as ‘interesting’ in his entire life._

_“You live in my constituency, don’t you? So I’m curious- last election, who did you vote for?”_

_Talking politics with her is a bad idea. It isn’t as though this thing they have has made him lose sight of how far their principles diverge. In all likelihood, there’s probably some common ground they could stand on somewhere – he’s just not sure they’ve found it yet._

_“I’m Glaswegian, my dad worked on the shipyards, and I went to a bog-standard comprehensive in the East End- who do you_ think _I vote for?”_

_“I could guess,” she concedes, running her fingers through the unruly hair at his temple. “But you might surprise me. You usually do.”_

_“Not this time.”_

_Julia looks down at him thoughtfully, as though this tiny bit of information that she basically already knew is the most interesting thing she’s ever heard._

_He pushes himself up on his hands, crawling up her body and placing kisses on her skin as he goes. “You done? Or do you wanna know what I think about Scottish independence now?”_

_Her eyes light up at the suggestion. David pretends to start leaving the bed, but doesn’t resist when she wraps her hand around the back of his neck and pulls him down to her._

 

-

 

 

 

Here’s what he knows (and always manages to forget) about grief:

It comes in waves. Circling, illogical waves.

The first person in their unit they lost in Afghanistan was a guy called Connor. David never liked him. He was popular in the same shallow way that school bullies usually become: not because he was a good friend, because people would rather be with him than be at the brunt of his attention. He was always the first to make shitty ‘jokes’ about any of the female soldiers, the first to disrespect a superior as soon as their back was turned.

Then he was shot in the head by a sniper while they were on foot patrol.

It was a shock, mainly because he was the first. A reminder, if they all weren’t already aware, that being out here was going to be brutal and bloody and they wouldn’t come back the same people they left home as.

They lost more before the tour ended. People David liked far more than Connor. Objectively far better people. Then, as quickly as it had begun, the tour ended and they were all left to pick up the pieces of their battered bodies and broken minds, and the memories of the ones who came home in a flag-draped coffin.

Connor was the only one of all those dead that David could think about when he returned to Vicky and the kids. He thought about goddamn Connor every single day for months.

He reached out to the young girlfriend Connor left behind, a (now) single mum of a little boy with another on the way— offered any help he could. She was a sweet girl, and very grateful.

“I’m glad Connor had such a great mate while he was out there,” she told him once.

_He didn’t_ , David wanted to say. _I thought he was a dickhead when he was alive._

He didn’t understand it for a long time. Why Connor became a symbol for something else, something deeper, in his mind. The way he thinks about Julia now has the same quality.

It wouldn’t have worked. He knows that, really. They weren’t made for the world beyond that hotel room.

Fuck knows how much they were keeping from each other. He still got viscerally angry when he thought about her voting record, the very same she defended more or less until the day she died.

A Glaswegian and a Tory politician was the opening line of a joke, not a serious relationship. The romantic impulse of _because it’s our choice_ would have faded before long— when the press would have had to find out and it really did become a joke.

He couldn’t picture them, then or now, doing all the shit that people in relationships are supposed to do together. Him trying to mix with her political cronies at dinners like he had anything in common with them. Introducing her to his _kids_.

Different worlds didn’t even cover it. He and Julia were from different universes, different fucking planes of reality.

All of this he knows and by all rights, it should make it easier, somehow. She would have been out of his life in one way or another, eventually. The bomb only brought the inevitable quicker and with more finality than he ever could have imagined.

 

 

He tells Vicky everything.

It isn’t his choice to do so. She finds him one night after a particularly brutal day at work -a round of questioning from Sharma and Rayburn that placed the blame at his feet for the bomb- hands dug hard into the couch, swallowing air instead of breathing.

It spills from him in one long breath, almost terrifyingly easy– about finding Andy at Pascoe House, when he turned the gun on himself, the power struggles between his bosses and the security service, being pressured to spy and work both sides. The bomb.

And Julia. Being with her. What she said to him before the speech.

Vicky listens in silence, never interrupting or questioning. The only visible reaction he gets from her throughout is a quiet gasp when she finds out about Andy— someone they used to invite around for dinner, who used to play dinosaurs with Ella and Charlie.

And when he’s finished, she doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“Oh, Dave,” she sighs. She leans her forehead on his shoulder. “What did you get yourself into?”

 

 

David awakes the next morning with a blistering headache and eyes that burn with tiredness. His head on a cushion in Vicky’s lap. It takes him a while to recall how he ended up there—  Vicky lying him down and running her fingers through his hair until he calmed down enough to sleep.

He looks at Vicky, dozing upright with her chin on her chest.

_This has to stop,_ he thinks.

So it does.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

Time passes unevenly.

The slow drag of each day but before he even realises it’s been weeks, then months. He isn’t allowed access to the investigation, except for being questioned over and over and over about what he saw and what he did and why he did it and whether he ever considered her aide a threat before and why not and who else can he think of who would want to harm the Home Secretary.

They announce nothing, no leads, no people of interest and David is almost certain it’s because they have none to announce. He tells them the same things every time and it never satisfies. Between his presence at two assassination attempts – one successful- the cloud of suspicion is never lifted from him, not even for a second.

But he understands Sharma and Rayburn have a job to do.  There’s just no way to get them to understand that if he’d wanted her dead, he could have done it far more discreetly than a sniper and a bomb.

He does what he must--  keep his job, to provide what he can and be a decent enough father to Ella and Charlie. To be normal. It must be convincing enough, because the next time David mentions moving back into his own flat, Vicky doesn’t fight him on it. Either that, or she’s just tired of having him under her feet.

He does what he must, and eventually the robotic movements of his body through each day start to feel vaguely normal again.

 

 

 

 

Before long, it’s been six months to the day since the bomb.

He’s been through the timeline of events that day so often -with Sharma and Rayburn in a police interview room, in his own mind at night- that he can almost name where he was and what he was doing to the minute.

He watches the time tick by on the digital clock on his oven and he can almost pretend he’s almost back there all over again.

David sits in the dark in his flat and toasts the occasion with a beer. He toasts her, allowing himself to fully remember that hotel room properly for the first time in a long time. He lets his chest seize with the bitter ache and longing he’s tried so hard not to feel since he lost it in front of Vicky.

The police therapist Craddock makes him see -as a condition to being allowed on active duty again some day in the distant future- exalts the value of letting emotions have their way every now and again, rather than bottling them up.

Some things the guy says makes sense -more than David thought going into it-  but on this point, he isn’t altogether convinced.

The doorbell rings at seven minutes past ten at night. At first it’s a relief to be pulled out of his own mind, something else to focus on, until he takes in what time it is and that this is very unlikely to be a social call. 

In the peephole there’s a dark figure a good few feet away and turned away from the door, and David’s hackles rise instantly— thinking about his gun in his bedside chest, about the block of knives in the kitchen and which would be the quickest to get to if necessary.

David slides the chain on the door as quietly as he can manage and turns the mechanism slowly.

“Yeah?” he says. The figure turns, steps into the light— leaning heavily on a set of crutches.

And then there’s a dead woman on his doorstep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took me longer than anticipated only because working full time has been roundhouse kicking me in the face recently, but here it is at last
> 
> a couple of things to note: first, as you may have noticed, this story deals more in feelings than in actual storyline, so if you're looking for a full explanation of exactly how she survived and who helped and all of that jazz-- this ain't the fic for you. what follows will likely be unrealistic, wrong, just plain vague on details etc but suspend your disbelief and hopefully you'll enjoy the ride anyway? anyways I hope this chapter makes sense to people other than me...
> 
> second, I have been made aware that Craddock was revealed to be a ""Baddie"" in the finale, but this is canon divergent after ep4 so just ignore all of that. lol.

 

 

The bottom of his stomach falls all the way out.

For an insane second, he’s sure he must be hallucinating. That maybe he’d gotten so lost in remembering all of it -all of her- that he’s plucked her out of his own mind.

“Did you miss me?” Julia Montague says.

That voice. He’d forgotten the particular clipped quality to it. He’d had to stop himself from going on YouTube to watch her speeches and interviews when it got really bad. He couldn’t possibly hallucinate it.

All he can do is stare at her through the slat in the door.

“Can I come in?” she asks gently.

He closes the door to undo the chain automatically, but he stops with his hand poised over it. Seized with the instinct to just leave it shut, pretend the last minute and a half didn’t happen. Pretend every hastily patched over wound she left hadn’t just been ripped fully open.

He could just go to bed. By the time he woke up, she’d be gone. He could convince himself he dreamt it. It’s not like it’d be the first time – it could just be an unusually vivid bad dream.

It’d be easy.

He undoes the chain and opens the door. Steps back to let her in, for which she smiles gratefully. Her crutches click and tap on the laminate floor and David can hear his heartbeat in his ears.

Her eyes scan his flat— taking in the empty beer bottles, the remains of a ready meal on a plate on the coffee table, the solitary lamp switched on in one corner. David just stares. His throat is too thick to say anything. He doesn’t even blink. Too much to even begin to process. His mind can only rebel against the reality present by his eyes.

Julia (alive, breathing, _real_ ) glances back at him.

“How are your children?” she tries after a long minute of silence.

“Fine.”

“Good. And… how are you?”

“... You serious?”

He means it to sound annoyed but when he hears himself it just sounds tired. God, he’s tired.

“I’m sorry. It’s just- difficult to know where to start.”

David’s got several good ideas.

“How- did you… do it?” he says, every word coming out as its own strangled question.

“It was… taken out of my hands, really,” she explains slowly. “After the explosion, I had emergency surgery—”

“I know. I was there.” She looks at him, surprised. “I saw the surgeon tell your mother you were dead.”

“He… wasn’t a surgeon.” David nods slowly— part of the conspiracy, then. Going back to that moment in his mind still feels like a punch in the gut. Even now he knows none of it was real. “I was taken to a private hospital for treatment, under guard and complete secrecy— even my mother wasn’t told I was actually still alive until they were sure it was safe. I had a fractured pelvis, internal bleeding, broken ribs, fractured skull and a severely broken leg. I woke up a week later, and saw the news of my own death on the news. So that was a shock.”

She attempts a smile, a joke, but he can’t engage. He’s never felt less like laughing. David just screws his eyes shut, scrubbing a hand down his face.

“Who’s ‘they’? Who the fuck could pull this off?”

As soon as he asks, he can see she has no intention of answering. She looks down and away from him, shifting her weight.

“I know people... who know people.”

David waits, but no further explanation is forthcoming. She just looks at him evenly- the only sign that this exchange is at all affecting her is the folding and unfolding of her hands around her crutch handles.

“That all I get?” he asks, the carefully constructed calm threatening to break for the first time.

“You know I can’t-”

“Bullshit,” he says flatly. She isn’t his Principal anymore, she’s dead, but the look of surprise on her face still makes him feel like he’s being insubordinate somehow. What a fucking joke. “You’re not Home Secretary anymore. This is just me and you, Julia.”

She sighs, like she’s dealing with an obstinate child. “David—”

“Don’t fucking ‘ _David’_ , me! What did you fucking expect?! That you could come back from the dead and we just pick up where we left off? That I’d be your little fuck buddy and keep on accepting your bullshit?”

“Of course not,” she says. Somehow her level voice only makes him more angry. He wants her to fucking scream back— at least then he’d feel sure she gives a shit. “It’s just safer -for you- that you don’t know some things.”

“Is that right?”

It’s almost insulting that she thinks he’d believe that.

“Yes. I know it must be hard to trust me right now, but—”

“Some things never change with you, do they? Jesus Christ. You have no idea, no fucking clue.”

“I just need you to give me a chance to explain. I’m trying, I promise you- I’m trying to be as honest as I can with you.”

“Try harder.”

She looks at him helplessly. Literally speechless— for the first time in her life, probably.

“I think you should go.” He brushes past her and opens his front door. “Come back when you’re ready to be fucking honest with me for once.”

“David-”

“I want you to leave.”

She opens her mouth as though to argue, but all the fight drains out of her abruptly.

“Okay.”

She hobbles past him and out the door, leaving the scent of lavender in his nose. Lavender on the move, he thinks bitterly. He hates that his instinct is still to be concerned about how she’s getting home— wherever the fuck home is for a legally dead former Cabinet minister.

“Why the fuck did you even come here, Julia?” He can’t resist asking.

She turns back, half way. “I wanted to see how you were.”

It seems honest, which makes it all the more unfathomable. Instead of engaging with it, David just shuts the door. All the structure leaves his body and he slides down it into a heap on the floor.

The blood churns in his ears and behind his eyes.

_She’s alive._

 

 

  

 

The doorbell rings again the next night, almost exactly the same time. He knows exactly who it is this time and he’s half annoyed, half glad.

“I ruined your life, didn’t I?” she says, instead of a greeting.

The genuine regret in her voice gives him pause from his instinct of shutting the door in her face. David leans against the door frame and sighs.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I did a pretty stellar job of that on my own”

It did ruin his career, maybe. The pervasive rumours about him, without enough substantiation for a disciplinary hearing, never mind criminal charges—but enough to make him untrustworthy. Then there was the bomb. His failure to detect it. He’s on administrative duties for the foreseeable, which he hates, but as Craddock reminds him - it could have been much worse.  If it hadn’t been for his impeccable record prior to that day, and being the Hero of 1/10.

Dull as his desk job is, it’s the nine-to-five, Monday-Friday job he’s never had in his entire working life. The one Vicky begged him to get when he left the Army, so they could make a real go of things.

It’s something he’s still adjusting to, but he gets to see the kids every weekend these days. Vicky and the kids paid the first year’s rent on a allotment plot for his birthday and he tends that twice a week. It’s nice. It’s peaceful.

In some ways, he’s almost better off. It’s still difficult to see it that way, still feels like he’s bouncing off the walls of his own mind when he has too much time alone.

“Who else knows?” he asks. “Who else knows you’re alive?”

“My mother, the people who arranged all of it obviously...” She pauses. “And now, you.”

David chews this over for a moment. He exhales and steps back to let her in. She smiles at him, wanly, gratefully.

“Why do I know?” he says, following her through to his living room. “Why now?”

“I was told it was a bad idea, to contact anyone I knew.” She shrugs to herself, then looks up at him “Out of all the people in my life… you were the only one who deserved better than the lie.”

It doesn’t answer all his questions, not even remotely. He still doesn’t know who the fuck ‘they’ are or who’s telling her all of this stuff. But it’s honest.

And it’s enough, for now.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

It becomes a regular thing, despite his better judgement. Almost every night, except when he has the kids or he’s over at Vicky’s for dinner with them. She turns up with a takeaway sometimes, other times he cooks some pasta or soup or whatever he has in his cupboard.

And they talk. His kids, her physical therapy and their respective backgrounds come up most often.  She never really tells him anything about her miraculous return from the dead in so many words but he puts it together in his mind, not caring if he’s right or not anymore.

All the nights he spends essentially waiting for her _one-two-three_ rhythm on his doorbell, he wonders if this’ll be it: the night he’s finally had enough and ignores it completely. But it never is. He still lets her in, every time.

  

 

There are rules though. Made more powerful by being unspoken.

Like the fact they don’t touch. Not ever. There’s no brushing of hands or guiding her to the door when she leaves. He has his space on the sofa and she has hers.

Sometimes he’ll look at her and there’s nothing in the world he wants more. Sometimes it’s a fight against his own muscle memory, burned into him so fucking deep in those few hallowed weeks they had, not to pull her in and feel her skin against his. Sometimes it even seems like it’d help: that maybe if he could fuck her- just fuck all the misplaced grief and frustration and confusion away. Maybe it’d all be better that way. It was their tried and tested method of conflict resolution back then, after all.

 

 

-

 

 

They’re sharing a pizza one evening when Roger Penhaligon shows up on the late night politics show they’re half watching. David hasn’t been following politics much since, but he knows Julia’s ex has been riding the crest of a wave of public sympathy since becoming her de facto mourner-in-chief. The twenty four hour news cycle doesn’t seem to remember that they were at each throats until the day she ‘died’.

He’s being profiled – his life, his career. The plan to launch a fund in Julia’s memory to get young women into politics. With his support as a figurehead rather than a sponsor, of course.

It’d be sweet if it wasn’t so self-serving. David moves to change the channel, but Julia shakes her head. She watches her ex-husband profiteer from her death with a kind of resigned contempt.

“I never wanted to get married, you know. Never imagined myself as anyone’s wife.”

“Why did you?”

She shrugs, taking a bite of pizza. “He was the rising star of the party at the time, and we thought it would be better for his image if we were married. Of course, it was long since socially acceptable to ‘live in sin’, as it were, but these prejudices run deep. Especially in Conservative voters.”

She’s still watching the TV. He’s watching her. “So what happened?”

From what he remembers of those weeks Before (Before Bomb and After Bomb- how his thoughts organise these days) he could ask a question and come up against a wall, if she decided it’s beyond his level of privilege. He doesn’t know how far she’ll let him push now.

“I followed him into politics, because I became frustrated with the… rigidity, let’s say- of the justice system and seeing him made me think I might be able to change it for myself. And he was supportive, at first.”

“Until you started doing better than him,” David guesses.

“More or less. I’m not going to pretend I was completely blameless because… well, you know me— I’m difficult before I’m ever anything else.” She shoots him a wry look and he finds himself smiling, almost against his will. “I can pick a fight with a brick wall. And neither of us would ever back down, even when the fighting got nasty. Eventually the things we had in common became the things we hated most about each other.”

David doesn’t says anything for a while. On the television, the Roger Penhaligon segment ends with one final smug smile at the interviewer.

“Sounds like a shitshow.” He looks at her. “Your marriage, I mean.”

Julia laughs out loud, like the sound surprises her. “It was. Total fucking shitshow, actually.”

 

 

-

 

 

“You seem happier these days, David— lighter, even,” his therapist comments to him one afternoon. “Any particular reason for that?”

Julia comes to mind before he can even process the words fully.

“Must be your therapy,” David says instead. “You’ve cured me.”

 

 

 

-

 

 He doesn’t know if this actually counts as the ‘falling back into unhealthy habits’ his therapist warns him about. Probably.

David doesn’t know what they’re doing, where this is going. But now he’s experienced both, he can say one thing with some certainty: A world with Julia Montague living and breathing is better than the one without.

“What are you going to do now?” he wonders. “How does a dead woman _live_?”

“I don’t know. Genuinely, no idea.” She leans back and sighs. “God, I used to have it all worked out. I was going to be Prime Minister, you know.”

He half-smiles. He has no doubt she would have. “I know.”

“And now, for the first time in my adult life, I have no idea what comes next.”

“People go through their whole lives without a plan,” he reminds her.

She’s smiling, but all he feels from her is some kind of deep sadness he’s never seen in her before. “Not me.”

David doesn’t know where she goes when she’s not with him: her life beyond his flat is a necessarily a complete mystery to him. He hadn’t considered that her post-death life might be so unsatisfying for her. Like a punishment: one that, despite everything, he isn’t sure she deserves.

 

 

 

“You didn’t fail me, you know.”

David squints at her in the dark. Conversations in his hallway as she leaves aren’t part of their strange nightly routine- practically sacrosanct in its uniformity by now.

“What?”

“You didn’t fail me. Or Kim, or Tahir, or anyone else at the College that day.”

His muscles tense, fists clench at his side and around his front door handle. He can’t look at her. They don’t talk about the bomb if they can help it.

“I’m sure your bosses -and probably mine- will try to make it seem that way, usually to cover for their own failings or get the information they want out of you through guilt, but it isn’t true and you shouldn’t believe them.”

How casually and accurately she sums up the last seven months of his life throws him for a loop. He wants to disagree with her, but can’t think how to.

She has that same look in her eyes, the same look on her face, the same as that room Before, before everything went to shit.

_I want you right beside me._

“Try to remember that,” she tells him this time.

For a single terrifying, hopeful moment he thinks she’s going to kiss him.

She doesn’t. “See you soon, David.”

David lets her go, watching as her hooded figure disappears into the inky night.

 

 

-

 

 

It starts with a grainy picture on a conspiracy theorist’s Twitter. It could have been anyone, late at night and she’s half moving— ducking into a car outside a block of London flats.

His flats.

She and her post-death team of crack MI5 agents must not have taken it seriously enough to squash it at the source, or they didn’t do it quick enough at least. David would have.

Two weeks later, her face is on every newspaper front page in Britain. Another amateur paparazzo took a chance and snapped a better picture – this time she’s looking almost directly down the camera lens. Unmistakable, even in low light.

And it’s the story of the century.

The evening after, he gets a text from an unknown number, unsigned, apologising that she won’t be able to make it to his place as usual, and probably not for the foreseeable future. She doesn’t need to explain why.

He understands. It’s only a miracle no one seems to connect the dots between where she was seen and where he lives, because that would really be the last thing either of them need.

(He saves the number in his phone as _Lavender_. For old times’ sake.)

“Did you know?” Vicky asks, casually, when he’s over for dinner with the kids and it’s the top story on the News At Six.

“Not until recently,” he tells her, carefully.

“Hm.” She turns to Ella and Charlie and smiles as though nothing’s happened. “I hope you two are both eating your peas or they’ll be no dessert!”

In the midst of it all, Julia texts him _I need to get out of London for a while. Not sure where yet._

She’s in a world of shit. Turns out faking your own death – with or without the tacit agreement and help of members of the security services in order to smoke out assassins- is pretty fucking frowned upon. There’s talks of inquiries and summons before Parliamentary Select Committees. So it doesn’t surprise him in the slightest that she’s going to leave the epicentre of the hurricane.

What surprises him is the message he receives two minutes after the first.

_Do you want to come with me?_

Then:

_I know you have your children to think about, and I don’t expect you to drop everything for me. Equally, if you want to use this as an opportunity to break all ties with me, I would understand. But just think about it._

He does think about it. All the fucking time. It feels like she’s presenting him with almost every single version of the future there is and asking him to choose between them. David half types out a variety of responses of all eventualities before deleting them.

He even talks to Vicky about it. She’s supportive of the idea of him taking some time off and getting away, less supportive when Julia comes into it.

She eyes him warily across the dining room table. It’s late and the kids have long since gone to bed. “She’s really done a number on you, hasn’t she?”

David wants to deny it, but he can’t. Vicky shakes her head, wrapping her hands around her coffee cup.

“Look, David, I’m not going to tell you what to do and you know I’m always here for you, no matter what. But…- after everything that’s happened, are you sure you want to be part of her world? Is it worth it?”

“I don’t know,” David says, honestly. “I don’t know.”

“But you still want to go with her,” she guesses. She sounds resigned. “Don’t you?”

He’s struck with a wave of gratitude for her: that she’s still willing to be his voice of reason after everything he’s put her through. He isn’t at all sure just how he managed to keep her in his life through this whole shit storm.

It’s gone eleven, and time he ought to be leaving. She has to work in the morning. He pushes out his chair and gets up.

“I’ll let you know. Might not even get time off work anyway.”

This is a lie. Julia’s resurrection, along with causing the curious and gossiping stares to start up again every time he walks in a room at the station, led Craddock to strongly hint time off might not be a bad thing whilst things die down. Couched in concern for his well-being, of course.

Vicky tugs his coat sleeve as he passes.

“Dave,” she starts. “Whatever you do, just… don’t lose yourself, okay? The kids have loved having their Daddy back these past few months.” She smiles up at him. “So have I.”

“Thank you.” David leans down and kisses her forehead. “Really.”

 

 

 

Two full days later, he writes a response to her message.

_I know somewhere we can go._

He closes his eyes, and presses send.

 

 

_-_

 

People complain and people mock, but David knows the truth: Scotland’s cold is better than any other cold in the world.

It wraps around him like an old blanket, pinching his cheeks like an kindly elderly relative. The sea stretches out endlessly in front of him. He used to come here every summer as a kid— all his family holidays spent walking along the bay with ice cream, running across the beach so fast his eyes would water.

It’s quiet because it’s the off season— the penny arcades and the beach side cafes shut up against the wind and the frigid air.

He asked her to meet him here, and told her he’d take care of the rest so she wouldn’t have to put her name to anything. He calls in a few favours at the cottage his family used to rent, whose elderly landlady still remembers him as little Davey Budd, so he can remain anonymous too.

She couldn’t be too careful when more and more pictures of her risen from the dead made the big bucks right now.

Some habits really do die hard.

He feels her presence next to him before he even hears her approach, her shoulder brushing his. They stand like that for what feels like an age— visible breaths mingling in the air in front of them.

“So…” Julia asks. “Where do we go from here?”

David doesn’t know. All he knows is that he hasn’t seen her in the daylight in so long.

His fingers meet hers in the space between them, tangling together.

It's a good enough place to start.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> firstly, thank you all so much for reading and kudosing and commenting- I can't tell you how much it means to me that people enjoy the scenes that play in my brain all day every day
> 
> this story touches on many things (grief, military service, PTSD etc) that I have no personal knowledge or experience of, and can only imagine and google in place of that experience, so I hope I did them justice.
> 
> As far as I’m concerned only truly important line in this gargantuan exercise in self indulgence is this: _Vicky and the kids paid the first year’s rent on a allotment plot for his birthday and he tends that twice a week. It’s nice. It’s peaceful._ I am the originator and as far as I know, only proponent of the Give David Budd A Garden 2018 movement. He needs a peaceful life, gosh darn it.
> 
> The ending is supposed to be somewhat ambiguous (although my shipping leanings got the better of me) because quite genuinely I don’t know if their relationship would work in the real world. my intention with this fic was to give them a kind of emotional reset-to-zero. Whether it works is up to you.

**Author's Note:**

> The flowers David leaves at her grave is purple hyacinth which have the flower language meaning of ‘sorrow, please forgive me’. David doesn’t know this, but I do and that’s why I included it.
> 
> This was originally intended to be one long one shot but I started getting frustrated with it so it’s now going to be in two parts. And I actually think it has more impact as a two part story. I have mostly written part two but there’s a few things I’m having some trouble nailing down- anyways it shouldn’t be too long before it’s posted. 
> 
> I’m not even sure how I feel about this fic anymore but I feel like I had to post it out of sheer spite lol. Anyways, let me know what you think and I hope to have the next part up soon but I have just started a new job so bear with me.


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